Wunderland

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

  “And how is everyone today?” The teacher is beaming. “Scrubbed and fresh-faced and ready to work?”

  Scattered titters. Barely into his twenties, Herr Hartmann just joined the teaching staff this year, replacing dour and darkly dressed Frau Cohen. Most girls welcomed the change: with his thick slicked-back hair and trimmed mustache he evokes Clark Gable wearing a red armband. A year earlier, Renate might have fancied him too. Now, though, his handsome face sparks little more than a sour spike of anxiety.

  Picking up her pencil, she casts another glance up at Ilse, who is seated in her customary spot in the front row. As usual, she is scribbling away, probably finishing last night’s assigned essay on the postwar redrawing of German borders. Between her BDM activities and her writing duties at Das Deutsche Mädel, Renate guesses that she’s further behind than ever in her schoolwork. But in Herr Hartmann’s class it doesn’t seem to matter. A staunch Party man, he frequently assigns Ilse’s newsletter items for Press Study. Last week’s was about an upcoming visit by the British Boy Scouts to Berlin and the joint activities planned for them and the Hitlerjugend. “Unsere kleine Journalistin,” Herr Hartmann calls her. Our little lady journalist.

  “On to business,” he pronounces now. “I’ve got last week’s essays to give back: Expanding the Volkland: Our Need for New Space.” Pulling a sheaf of papers from his briefcase, he lays the first one down on Ilse’s desk with a flourish. “Fräulein von Fischer’s paper gets the prize this week. Exemplary work. It will go in the usual spot.” He jerks his chin at the side wall, upon which hangs a framed picture of the Führer, looking mournful. Beneath it, the week’s showcase-able assignments are thumbtacked in a neat row.

  “The rest of you did acceptably well. With the usual exceptions.”

  Beside her, Karolin sighs. Indisputably their class’s star student in past years, like Renate she now struggles just to pass. It’s the same with all of the back-row students, including mousy-looking Amelia Kronberg and Rosa Sartro, rumored to be half Gypsy. It doesn’t help that whenever assignments have to do with das Volk and Deutsche Politik they—as non-Deutsch and non-Volk—are assigned different topics, almost always on things not covered in class. (This one: Water Systems in Ancient Mesopotamia.)

  “Is there even a point?” Karolin mutters beneath her breath now.

  It’s barely a whisper. Nevertheless, one row up Herr Hartmann pauses, his ear cocked like a hound hearing the hunt trumpet.

  “Fräulein Beetle,” he says, frowning and using the name he’s given her (Beidryzcki, he says, is too much of a “foreign tongue teaser”). “What are you hissing and clacking about back there?”

  “Nothing, sir,” Karolin says quickly. “I was—just asking Renate for a pencil.”

  Renate half lifts her own pencil and nods. The teacher ignores her. “You came to class without a means of writing?”

  “I—I have a pencil, sir,” says Karolin. “But I just discovered the tip was broken.”

  “And no backup.”

  He is still smiling. But there’s a tightness to his grin that Renate knows all too well. She feels her fingers clenching around her friend’s alibi even as the axe falls: “Demerit for unpreparedness. You too, Fräulein Bauer.”

  Renate blinks. “Sir?”

  “For your role in distracting the class.”

  “But I…”

  “Shut your Yid trap,” he snaps.

  Renate’s breath catches like a fishbone in her throat.

  A stunned silence descends, followed by a single, nervous-sounding giggle from somewhere in the front. It sounds suspiciously like Sofi Sitz. Renate fixes her gaze on the pencil sharpener, biting her lower lip to keep it from trembling. A meter away Ilse sits in her chair, her shoulders stiffened, her figure motionless.

  Turn around, Renate wills her, as Herr Hartmann resumes his distribution. But the blond girl doesn’t move.

  Upon reaching Renate’s row Herr Hartmann announces its results for the general benefit of all: “Incoherent (slap)…Sloppy (slap)…Devoid of logic (slap).” But as he returns Renate’s he merely lifts an eyebrow, slamming the paper facedown atop her notebook. Only when he’s reached his lectern does she allow herself to quickly flip the page over and survey his commentary.

  Despite the complete randomness of the topic, she’d spent extra time on this one, interviewing her father extensively and on his suggestion researching Mesopotamia and Ancient Sewage in the big Ancient Civilizations Enzyklopädie at the Charlottenburg public library. She’d included several carefully penciled diagrams and even typed it up on Vati’s Adler, all in the hope she might break through the wall of Substandards and Disappointings her teachers have been piling against her. She certainly wasn’t looking for the sort of praise she once took for granted; the Beautifully wordeds and Well dones and Quite Impressive Fräulein Bauers. She was aiming, at most, for Good Enough. But to no avail: overscrawled the neat black lettering, in Reich red, is Herr Hartmann’s verdict: Pathetic.

  Don’t fret too much, he has added. After all, as a foreigner you can’t be expected to write in German with the fluency of a native.

  Renate fists her hands against her thighs: if only she could she’d scrunch the thing up and hurl it in his face. But of course, she knows better. The first and only time Karolin even contested a mark he’d given her he’d ripped the paper in half before the whole class and further degraded it from a Poor to a Fail.

  Instead, Renate folds the assignment into the tightest wad she can manage before shoving it into her satchel’s furthest reaches.

  Closing her eyes, she breathes in slowly, out slowly. Just get through today, she thinks. She recites it over and over—through today, through today—until, eventually, her heart stops pounding in protest.

  * * *

  It’s been her mantra ever since her Mischling unmasking. For a full week after that disastrous day she’d remained locked in her room, emerging only to return barely touched trays of food to the hallway, or to scurry to the washroom and back. She’d ignored Franz’s quiet knocks and Sigmund’s frenzied scratchings and her parents’ pained pleas to come downstairs, to let us help, to talk this over. She ignored Ilse’s four phone calls and two personal visits, not even answering when her mother knocked to let her know her friend was waiting in the downstairs hallway. She even ignored her beloved books, for when she tried to read one it was as though the letters and words had been somehow rearranged in some unintelligible format. The only thing she felt capable of doing was sitting and staring down at Ragdoll Alice from Wonderland: she of the boneless hug, the Mona Lisa–stitched smile, the unsurprised blue-button eyes.

  Don’t open the door was the doll’s silent suggestion. If you wait long enough you’ll wake up like I did, and it will all have been nothing more than a dream.

  But after five largely sleepless nights and increasingly unwashed days it became clear that this wasn’t likely to happen. And so on the sixth day—a Sunday—Renate pulled the chair from beneath her doorknob and crept down the hall into Franz’s room—silently, and very early, the way she’d often done as a small girl. She had perched on his coverlet, hugging her knees until he somehow sensed her through his dreams, and—gradually, begrudgingly—emerged from them with groans and fluttering lashes to find her staring at him miserably.

  “What do I do?” she whispered. “I can’t go back. I won’t survive the year.”

  “Don’t think of the year,” he said, his voice still gravelly with sleep, his black curls a tangled halo around his head. “Don’t think about it that way. Just think about getting through today.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can.”

  “I can’t, Franz.”

  “You can. Jews have gotten through worse.”

  “Stop saying that! I’m not a Jew!”

  “All right, Schwester. I take it back.” His tone was indulgent, as though
she were three again and threatening to throw one of her tantrums. And just as he had when she was three, he pulled the covers back and moved over for her: “Komm!”

  The bed was small now, of course, and they were both far too old. But after a moment’s hesitation she slid in next to him anyway, settling on her back beside him with her arms folded behind her head, staring up at his white, sunlight-striped ceiling. They didn’t embrace or even touch; for this (they both sensed) would have been too strange. But he did turn his head to look at her sympathetically.

  “Another suggestion?” he asked.

  And when she nodded: “Take a bath. Du stinkst.”

  Renate glared at him: “Shut up.” But she lifted her arm, taking a careful whiff of herself beneath it, blinking in mortification because he was right: she did stink.

  And then they were both laughing; and after the laughter simply lying there, his brown eyes shut and hers open, the slowing sleepsong of his breath like a calming lullaby.

  A day later, she bathed, dressed, and dragged herself back to Gymnasium—or rather, the strange, new place it had become in her absence.

  * * *

  Recrossing her ankles under her desk, Renate feels the hard point of Sofi’s envelope poking through the thin material of her skirt pocket. Pulling it out, she leans over to drop it into her satchel before stopping and studying it for a moment.

  The sensible thing to do, of course, is to open the thing after school, away from Herr Hartmann’s further wrath and Karolin’s (inevitably) bruised feelings. But suddenly she doesn’t care what makes sense and what doesn’t. Not when nothing really makes sense to begin with.

  Setting it in her lap, she runs her fingertip over the elaborate rendering of her name: Fräulein Renate Bauer. Just seeing it like that, written out so carefully and beautifully, feels like a much-needed affirmation: I exist. And not only that, she is going to a party—her first of the year. At least, her first not counting a dismal gathering last month at the Beidryzckis’ home. Closing her eyes, Renate imagines it: a glowing ballroom, chandeliers casting glinting rainbows of life. Pink punch in crystal goblets. The sweet terror of being asked to dance by a boy. The joy of dancing. Really dancing again! True, they will probably only play dreary, boring German songs now that the government’s denounced swing and jazz as Neger-Kike Musik. But it will be heavenly nonetheless to circle a dance floor in her best red shoes, in her best white dress. To feel a boy’s arms around her waist.

  The only downside is that Rudi will likely be there, doing his best to pretend Renate is invisible—just as he has since the news about her racial makeup came out.

  The note had shown up in her notebook on Renate’s second day back. Terse and neat, it had comprised two lines: Due to incompatibilities of the blood, I regret that any future association between yourself and myself is out of the question. Please do not talk to me.

  Stunned, Renate had ventured upstairs to the boys’ floor, wandering alone down a hallway full of whispers and half smirks and bemused gazes that didn’t quite meet her own. She’d finally found him in the library, not at their usual study table but in a small corner table half hidden in the stacks. Note in hand, she’d walked toward him hesitantly, the girls and boys at the other tables monitoring her approach with the electric thrill of an execution-day crowd. When he looked up his face was so familiarly perfect, so perfectly familiar that she couldn’t believe it wouldn’t break into its usual bright smile.

  But of course, it did not. “What is it?” he snapped. “What do you want?”

  “I just—I got your letter.”

  “Then why are you here? I made everything quite clear.” He looked angry—no, more than angry. Furious. He was, she saw in wonderment, actually shaking.

  “I just thought…” She swallowed, aware that every eye in the room was trained on them. “I thought we could talk.”

  “Talk?” His voice rose sharply, cracking in a way that in the past they would have laughed at together. “About what? About how you tricked me into falling for you, with your Yid lies and spells?”

  Renate gaped at him. “Rudi. You know I didn’t know.”

  “Does it matter if a typhus carrier knows they have typhus, when they infect everyone in their path?”

  The mercilessness of the attack left her breathless. “You can’t really think…”

  “It’s not my ‘thinking.’ It’s the Führer’s word. The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus!” His ability to remember and quote passages from books after a single reading had become a sort of joke between them. Now the words felt like a weapon. Her heart pounding, she found herself unable to respond, to even move. She simply stood there, a willing, trembling target.

  “Here’s another one for you.” He was blinking rapidly—not in anger, she suddenly saw, but on the verge of tears. Despite everything, her first instinct was to comfort him. “The black-haired Jewish girl lies in wait for hours on end. Satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious boy whom she plans to seduce…”

  And though Renate’s hair is not black but brown, she found her own eyes welling up, her own heart shredding. And while all she wanted to do was hurl herself into his arms she’d instead hurled herself from the room, her satchel slapping against her thighs, whispered laughter spreading slickly in her wake.

  The memory makes her throat tighten. Don’t think about it, she orders herself. Think about good things. Think about the party. Think about dancing.

  She flips the envelope over, casting a quick glance at Herr Hartmann. “As you all now know,” he is noting, stabbing his pointer at the map, “our borders to the east should include this part of West Prussia, as well as Silesia starting here.”

  Holding her breath, Renate peels the envelope lip open and eases the oblong rectangle from it. Her first thought is that it’s smaller than she’d expected. And more businesslike-looking: rather than the soft-curving letters of a typical invitation the words are printed in heavily blocked-out font.

  Frowning, Renate holds the cardboard square higher, above the desk’s shadow, and squints:

  Einfache Fahrkarte nach Jerusalem.

  Bitte kehre nicht zurück!

  One-Way Ticket to Jerusalem.

  Please don’t bother returning!

  The words circle a crude sketch of a somber-looking and faintly familiar face: bulbous nose, piggish eyes, stubble-covered double chin. It takes a moment to remember where she has seen it before. It’s a typical Juden face, similar to those that in past months have festooned front pages and posters across the city.

  Furiously, she turns the card over, hiding the hateful words and image from herself. It’s only then that she realizes something is written on the back. Three words scrawled in blue:

  Bon Voyage!

  Rudi.

  Quivering with shock, she shoves the thing into her skirt pocket again and forces her gaze back to the teacher. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpses Karolin watching her. But there’s a vague sense that if she doesn’t allow her gaze to touch anyone else’s, then perhaps her shame and her hurt won’t be registered by them. Or even by herself. So she fixes her eyes on Herr Hartmann’s well-muscled back and manages to keep it there for several fleeting seconds. But then, somehow, she is looking directly at Sofia Sitz, twisted back in her front-row seat, her pink lips split in a triumphant grin.

  Very slowly, the other girl lifts her hand. Auf Wiedersehen, she mouths.

  Face flushing, Renate stiffly looks away, her gaze coming to rest on Ilse’s back again. Turn around, she thinks again. Look at me. She wills it with as visceral a force as she can summon, a silent howl hurled across the rustling room. But Ilse’s face remains turned toward the geographic display before her, the crosshatched shadows of German culture across the la
nds.

  And somehow it’s this—not the lingering sting of Herr Hartmann’s grade or labels, not the hot humiliation of having walked straight into Sofi’s trap, but her former best friend’s back, white-clothed and ruler-straight—that pushes Renate past the edge. She is on her feet before she realizes it, moving swiftly toward the door, only faintly hearing Herr Hartmann’s “Now where on earth are you off to, Fräulein Bauer?”

  When she keeps walking he repeats the question, an octave higher. “Madame Mischling,” he shouts. “Are you deaf? Where are you going?”

  Renate pauses in the doorway, just long enough to turn back. The words lie there on her tongue, spiked with rage and fully formed: Nach Jerusalem. She opens her mouth to say them, gaze locked not with Herr Hartmann’s but with Ilse’s, as gray and blank as a cloudless sky before sunrise. But when she tries to speak her stomach clenches, her mouth and throat emitting nothing but a dry and silent rasp of air. She’s like a car, out of fuel. She has just enough power to turn on her heel and continue walking.

  * * *

  The break with Ilse had been less abrupt than with Rudi, and yet ultimately, that had made it more tortuous. At first she’d let herself hope the lengthening silences between them were simply circumstantial: a phase. After all, they had both made new friendships: Ilse on her BDM camping trips and hikes and Renate within an informal Judea study group Franz had formed, half in irony but also half not. (“If we’re to be citizens of this so-called Jewish Nation,” he reasoned, “we should at least know a little about the place.”)